Morales v. Ault

• Decision Date: 07 February 2007
• Docket Number: No. 05-4021.,05-4021.
• Citation: 476 F.3d 545
• Parties: Byron MORALES, Appellant, v. John F. AULT, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

476 F.3d 545

Byron MORALES, Appellant, v. John F. AULT, Appellee.

No. 05-4021.

United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.

Submitted: May 17, 2006.

Filed: February 7, 2007.

David J. Dutton, argued, Waterloo, IA (Erin Patrick Lyons, Dutton & Braun, on the brief), for appellant.

Thomas William Andrews, argued, Asst. U.S. Atty. Gen., Des Moines, IA, for appellee.

Before WOLLMAN, BRIGHT, and BOWMAN, Circuit Judges.

BOWMAN, Circuit Judge.

Byron Morales petitions the Court for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (2000). He challenges his 1997 Iowa state court conviction for first-degree murder, which was upheld by the Iowa Court of Appeals on direct appeal and in post-conviction proceedings. Morales asserts two grounds for habeas relief: (1) he received ineffective assistance of trial counsel in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution and (2) the state failed to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963). The District Court¹ denied the petition and Morales now appeals. We affirm.

I.

Shortly after 1:00 p.m. on November 10, 1995, Byron Morales made an emergency call to 911 and reported that his two-year-old son² Kevin was unresponsive. When paramedics arrived, Morales told them that Kevin had fallen down the stairs leading to the basement. Morales said that after the fall he put Kevin to bed but called for an ambulance when Kevin began having difficulty breathing. The paramedics took Kevin by ambulance to a local hospital. Upon arrival at the hospital, Kevin was unresponsive, had a low heart rate, and was having trouble breathing. The right side of his head was swollen, and a large pool of blood could be felt under his scalp. A CT scan revealed a skull fracture and a large hematoma on Kevin's brain. Dr. Thomas Carlstrom, a neurosurgeon, operated on Kevin to remove the hematoma. Kevin died during the surgery. Dr. Carlstrom, along with Dr. Donald Moorman, who was the surgeon leading the trauma team, and Dr. Dominic Frecentese, who was the radiologist that interpreted the CT scan, initially agreed that Kevin's death was caused by an existing, or chronic, hematoma on his brain that was re-injured by some event that day.

On November 11, 1995, Dr. Thomas Bennett, then the Iowa State Medical Examiner, performed an autopsy of Kevin's body. Dr. Bennett concluded that Kevin's brain injuries were acute, not chronic. He based his opinion in part on an examination of microscopic slides taken during the autopsy. In Dr. Bennett's view, the slides conclusively established that there had been no preexisting hematoma and that Kevin's injuries were all inflicted on the day of his death. Dr. Bennett reported the probable cause of death as "Blunt traumatic head injuries from blow to head, due to Shaken-Slammed Baby Syndrome." J.A. at 967. A police investigation ensued, and on November 12, 1995, Morales was arrested and charged with Murder in the First Degree.

Subsequent to Morales's arrest, his first attorney, James Benzoni, requested that a second autopsy be performed. He hired Dr. Michael Berkland, then the Deputy Medical Examiner in Kansas City, Missouri, to conduct the second autopsy. In conducting his autopsy, Dr. Berkland had access to Dr. Bennett's autopsy report, the microscopic slides, and Kevin's body. Because prosecutor Melodee Hanes had given instructions not to release Kevin's medical records to the defense team, however, Dr. Berkland did not at that time have the medical reports of the emergency-room physicians who diagnosed the hematoma as chronic in nature. Dr. Berkland concurred with Dr. Bennett that the injuries to Kevin's brain were acute.

In December 1995, the county prosecutor's office arranged a meeting at Dr. Carlstrom's office that was attended by four prosecutors and Doctors Bennett, Carlstrom, and Moorman. Morales's attorneys were not notified about the meeting. During the meeting, Dr. Bennett reported that the microscopic autopsy slides showed that Kevin's brain hematoma was acute, not chronic. As a result of Dr. Bennett's conclusions and without examining the slides themselves, Doctors Carlstrom and Moorman changed their opinions to align with Dr. Bennett's opinion that the injury was acute.

A jury trial was held in December 1996 in the Iowa District Court for Polk County. Morales was represented by Rodney Ryan and John Spellman. His theory of defense was that Kevin fell down a flight of eight stairs on November 10, 1995, thereby aggravating a preexisting hematoma and leading to his death. The jury found Morales guilty of first-degree murder, and the trial court sentenced him to life in prison. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction. Morales then sought post-conviction relief, which the Iowa courts denied. Thereafter, he filed his federal petition for writ of habeas corpus, which the District Court denied. Morales now appeals the denial of the writ.

II.

This is a sad and difficult case. A young boy is dead, while his father's conviction for the death rests on judicial proceedings that have raised multiple questions of fairness and just prosecution. Every court that has reviewed this case has been struck by certain aspects of the trial and actions of prosecutors that violate the fundamental notions of fair play on which our legal system is based. For example, the Iowa District Court for Polk County, addressing Morales's application for post-conviction relief, found prosecutor Hanes's instruction to withhold medical records from the defense team prior to the second autopsy "suspicious at best" and the prosecution-arranged meeting at which Kevin's treating physicians changed their opinions about the nature of Kevin's brain injury "questionable." Morales v. Iowa, No. PCCE 37829, slip op. at 3, 19 (Iowa District Court for Polk County Apr. 30, 2001). The Iowa Court of Appeals, while affirming the denial of post-conviction relief, "agree[d] with Morales that certain questionable activities and practices, which became known after his trial, cast a level of doubt on some evidence used to convict Morales in the death of his son." Morales v. Iowa, No. 2-520/01-1328, 2002 WL 31529176, *10 (Iowa Ct.App. Nov. 15, 2002). The District Court reviewing Morales's habeas corpus petition aptly observed that the "pretrial and trial process [in Morales's case] at best falls short of our expectations for so serious an endeavor." Morales v. Ault, No. 4:03-cv-40347, 2005 WL 5166197, 1 (S.D.Iowa Sept. 28, 2005). The District Court summarized the most egregious errors as follows:

A prosecutor instructed that evidence be withheld. Prosecutors arranged a meeting between the Medical Examiner and treating physicians, arguably to impact their trial testimony to be more consistent with that of the Medical Examiner. Important microscopic slide evidence, relied upon by the Medical Examiner, was not pursued by defense counsel or produced by the prosecution during the trial, and the slides were destroyed while the case was on appeal. Similar opinions by this Medical Examiner, often based upon such slides, have arguably been discredited in other cases. The treating surgeon has now recanted his trial testimony, at least to the extent of placing any reliance on the opinions of the Medical Examiner. Defense counsel failed to pursue the slides, failed to interview treating physicians before their trial testimony, failed to investigate the Medical Examiner even by simply networking with other defense lawyers, failed to pursue the meeting between the Medical Examiner and other physicians in relation to their apparent change in position at trial from their prior reports, failed to make objections necessary to preserving a record for appeal, and failed to make an adequate offer of proof regarding the romantic relationship between a prosecutor and the Medical Examiner.

Id. at 2-3.

Like the courts preceding us, we are troubled by these incidents and add our condemnation of such practices. That said, however, we conclude that Morales's petition for habeas relief must be denied. Quite simply, our decision in this case hinges on the standard of review that Congress has given us to apply.

Pursuant to the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), when a state prisoner files a petition for writ of habeas corpus in federal court we are directed to undertake only a "limited and deferential review of [the] underlying state court decisions." Lomholt v. Iowa, 327 F.3d 748, 751 (8th Cir. 2003), cert. denied, 540 U.S. 1059, 124 S.Ct. 833, 157 L.Ed.2d 716 (2003). We may not grant a writ of habeas corpus unless the state court's decision "was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States" or the state court's decision "was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding." 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), (2). A state court decision is "contrary to" clearly established Supreme Court precedent if it "applies a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth in [the Court's] cases" or if it "confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of [the] Court and nevertheless arrives at a result different from [the Court's] precedent." Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 405-06, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000). A state court decision is an "unreasonable application of" clearly established Supreme Court precedent if it "correctly identifies the governing legal rule but applies it unreasonably to the facts of a particular prisoner's case." Id. at 407-08, 120 S.Ct. 1495. "[A] federal habeas court may not issue the writ simply because that court concludes in its independent judgment that the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established federal law erroneously or incorrectly." Id. at 411, 120...